Falls Church, Va., looks to Reliable for IT help

Computerworld - The city of Falls Church, Va., disclosed this week that it has been an early adopter of an online trouble-ticket reporting system announced by Reliable Integration Services Inc. in Tysons Corner, Va.
The city of 10,400 residents has used Reliable to run its LAN, WAN and other IT systems for two years, replacing a four-person IT staff and adding features such as a virtual private network and accounting and police records management applications in a 130-desktop and 15-server system, according to Shirley Hughes, the city's general manager.
Reliable also announced this week that it is making the online ticket reporting generally available and is using IBM Tivoli management software tools in its service.
Online trouble tickets mean that Falls Church employees can fill in boxes describing a problem and send that by e-mail to Reliable, which instantly returns a confirmation that the trouble report was made, Hughes said. Most problems have been fixed in 15 minutes, she said.
Two years ago, Reliable was the smallest of several outsourcers the city considered, but it had the "greatest vision," she said. Now, "Reliable manages my entire system. The wonderful thing is that I don't have to be technical."
Falls Church pays the standard rate to Reliable of $100 per month per PC and $1,575 per server.
"I definitely think it is cost-effective for the city, and that's because if there's a problem, they usually know about it at Reliable before I do," Hughes said. "That's far preferable to having an IT staff, especially back when it was hard to find them and provide them benefits and train them."
Thanks to Reliable, Hughes believes the city avoided outages from the Nimda virus a year ago, which brought down nearby suburban jurisdictions for up to three weeks.
All told, the city is probably spending $150,000 per year more than when it managed its own systems, but it now has more capabilities and applications, including the ability to allow residents to check some city records online. "Reliable really has been a partner in taking us from the dark ages to being in a very good position," she said.
Analyst David Tapper at IDC in Framingham, Mass., said there are many small outsourcers similar to Reliable that compete with giants such as IBM, Electronic Data Systems Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co. and others.
"Outsourcing is a big market and mature, so it's become a market where it is tough for players to make money," Tapper said. Still, there is a place for smaller outsourcers that will work withsmaller customers, sometimes partnering with the big players.
The overall outsourcing market is continuing to expand and should grow by 5% in the U.S. in 2003 to $32.8 billion, up from $30.6 billion in 2002, according to IDC.